Western Society suffers from the lack of sleep: The significance of body clock

The human race has been bestowed with the cycle of day and night which is right from the beginning and is something that cannot be ignored. In Science however, demanding why and how for the everyday happenings can demand considerable hurdle of originality and construct the most engaging answers.

The three American biologists, Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young, who were awarded Noble Prize for medicine earlier this year for their innovation of the master genes managing the body’s circadian rhythms.

The first inkling of an internal clock emerged as early as 18th century when the French scientist Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan observed that plants retain at a stable temperature in a dark cupboard suddenly preserved their daily cadence of opening and closing their leaves. However, De Mairan himself inferred this was because they could “sense the sun without ever seeing it”.

When Hall, Rosbash and Young utilized fruit flies to single out a gene that dominates the rhythm of living organism’s daily life that scientists were able to have a glimpse of the time maintaining machinery inbuilt where it is explained that how plants, animals and humans modify their biological rhythm so that it is tuned with the Earth’s revolutions,” the Nobel prize committee said.

Utilizing fruit flies the team discovered a “period” gene which conceals a protein within the cell throughout the night which then deteriorates during the day in an infinite feedback cycle.